A Wonderful (Virtual) Life in Another World Anime

The New Recommendation of the Wonderful Virtual Life Anime!

One of the primary tropes in anime these days is the “normal Japanese person transported to another world anime” genre where they usually possess special advantages due to their knowledge of fantasy and/or video game worlds. The list of “another world anime” series is quite long, including Sword Art Online, Re:Zero, Konosuba, No Game No Life, Accel World, Rayearth, Overlord, Outbreak Company, The Familiar of Zero, Super Dimension Century Orguss, In Another World with my Smartphone, Restaurant in Another World, and Gate. And now there’s a new “another world anime” series: Net-Juu no Susume, or Recommendation of the Wonderful Net Life. It’s the story of a 30 year old NEET named Moriko playing an online game as a male character as a way of escaping from her stressful life. When she encounters a cute female character named Lily inside the game, the two players start having an in-world “romance,” each assuming the other is the gender of their character, though in reality Lily is the avatar of a socially awkward young man who works at a company nearby. It’s a charming and relaxing show with excellent characters and an original story, and we can’t help cheering for the two characters to find each other in the real world. The word Net-Juu (“a happy online life”) is a reference to Ria-Juu, a derogatory word for happy, well-adjusted people with boyfriends/girlfriends going on dates on Christmas Eve, who get mocked plenty in this show.

Part of speaking a foreign language means dealing with the possibility for garbled communications, as my bilingual family well knows. Over the weekend my son was visiting from university, and we wanted to go to see Thor: Ragnarok, which is marketed in Japan as Thor: Battle Royale because Japanese people aren’t up on their Norse mythology. I asked my wife if she wanted to go, but she said, “No! I wouldn’t want to see that movie, it seems much too scary.” We wondered why she would be afraid of a Superhero movie, and eventually realized she was talking about the newest Saw horror film, which for linguistic reasons is identical to Thor in Japanese (both are ソー, pronounced sau.)

For years, J-List has been selling fun kanji and anime T-shirts from our location in San Diego, including the such hits as “Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend” plus many fun anime T-shirts from your favorite anime shows. Our shirts have always been printed in San Diego by our talented staff, rather than mass-produced in Asia. Sadly, all good things must come to him, and we made the decision to exit the T-shirt market earlier this year. If you want to score some of our last awesome T-shirts and hoodies, you can with our new T-shirt Fukubukuro sets, which give you three random T-shirts in the size and style you choose for a great price, plus a random gift. We expect sizes to sell out quickly, so grab a grab bag soon!